"What loveliness escapes the schools": Carifesta’s Epistemological Critique

Invited presentation for "Beyond Boundaries: Seeing Art History from the Caribbean," a Clark Conference convened by Dr. Anna Arabindan-Kesson and Dr. Wayne Modest.

When writer George Lamming addressed the nearly ten thousand people gathered at the opening ceremony for the fourth edition of the Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta) held in 1981 in Bridgetown, Barbados, he spoke of an ongoing effort to redefine “ways of seeing” and “the terms of our meaning.” His speech paid tribute to six Caribbean cultural figures the festival honored that year, including visual artist Edna Manley of Jamaica, writer Aimé Césaire of Martinique, dancer Beryl McBurnie of Trinidad and Tobago, and poet Nicolás Guillén of Cuba. In exploring Caribbean realities, Lamming explained, these groundbreaking thinkers had recognized conflicts with predominant ways of seeing established by colonial rule. “Europe and their successors, the United States,” he orated, “have been trapped in the deceiving habit of seeing themselves not as a portion of mankind, but as the custodians of all human destiny.” For Lamming, those receiving tribute that day had sculpted, painted, authored, composed, improvised, and choreographed interventions that made palpable the colonially derived structures that shaped Caribbean life, social hierarchies, and cultural standards. Vitally, they also had been crafting alternatives. This paper considers Lamming’s words as a lens to look at the early Carifesta events themselves, transpiring in Guyana, Jamaica, Cuba, and Barbados across the long, heady 1970s. For many who envisioned the festival’s original contours, Carifesta was to embody precisely what Lamming stated: it was, among other things, a mode of epistemological critique. This paper assesses how that critique materialized, and where it fell short, through the festival’s panorama of visual art, material cultural, art writings, and “ethnographic” programming. It asks what (hi)stories of art and artmaking emerged that had been (and often continue to be) excluded from art history classrooms? What ways of seeing and looking surfaced? And what lessons can they teach us today?